Multilingual websites without hurting your SEO

Operating across Romania, Spain and international markets means publishing in several languages. Done carelessly, search engines read the versions as duplicates and choose one — often not the one you wanted.

Give every language its own URL

Each language version needs a distinct, crawlable address. Content swapped by JavaScript at the same URL leaves search engines with one page, and only one version is ever indexed.

The common structures all work:

• Subdirectories, such as /es/ and /ro/ — simplest, inherits domain authority
• Subdomains — more separation, more setup
• Country domains — strongest local signal, most expensive to run

Subdirectories are right for most companies.

Link the versions to each other

Every version must declare the others with hreflang annotations, and the set must be reciprocal — if the English page lists the Spanish one, the Spanish page must list the English one. One-directional annotations are ignored.

Include a self-reference on each page, and add an x-default pointing at whichever version serves visitors you have not published a language for.

Translate the whole page

Half-translated pages are a common failure. If the body is Spanish but the title tag, meta description, image alt text and structured data are English, the page sends contradictory signals.

Translate the slug too. A Spanish page at an English URL ranks worse for Spanish queries than one at a Spanish URL.

Do not rely on redirecting by location

Automatically sending visitors to a language based on their IP address blocks crawlers, which see the site from one location and may never reach the other versions. Detect location if you like, but suggest rather than force, and always leave every version directly reachable.

The content trap

Machine translation without review produces text that reads as machine translation. It ranks poorly and reflects badly. Translate the pages that matter commercially, properly, and leave the rest in one language rather than publishing three weak versions.

Three languages done well beats seven done automatically, every time.

We handle this as part of web development.